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Standard business behavior. Make the public pay for liability, but don't give the public the profits. Keep all profits for the investors, who supposedly deserve it for... no one knows why. Then use some of those profits to pay accountants to stash the cash in some foreign country and avoid taxes which might somehow benefit the people. Because those people paying for liability insurance don't deserve anything but grief for helping rich people fly into space. Makes good sense for a few, but not for the many.

Precisely this. A service/licensing/sales tax between corporations just like there is for an individual's purchases. With a higher tax rate when money goes from a national corporation to an international corporation (i.e. when money leaves the country). Preferably high enough that no profit is made.

Though include an increasing tax on profits, since those represent money taken unnecessarily from the public.

That doesn't mean she should be given carte blanche to tell bold faced lies to the people her words do effect.

I think you misunderstand modern marketing techniques, of which she is a famously notable expert.

It is our duty as technical experts to counterract that, to not tell lies. Which leads to awkward situations where a client's social learning is confronted with fact-based expertise. Requiring tact, patience, and some teaching skills if you want a better informed client. Same as when you go to a patent attorney, doctor, mechanic, accountant, or other expert after reading Slashdot discussions about their field.

In the US, there are more than 500 000 new businesses started every year (sole proprieters, limited partnerships, and such). Want to opt out of all the new businesses? Prepare to wind your way through 1300+ opt out forms and procedures every day of the year for the rest of your life. Then there are the 2/3rds of a million corporations that have been around longer than a year. In your free time you can opt out of those; at 1000/day it should only take 2 years with a few weekends off.

Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are three different things. How can we ever expect politicians to fix our IP system, when even many geeks seem incapable of understanding even the absolute basics?

Fix the IP system? Politicians, advertising, many corporations, and now you are actively confusing the public by grouping the 3 terms into "intellectual property." Of which there is no such thing. Owning ideas is impossible, outside of fiction and courtrooms.

Just to expand a little on your excellent post: before a test, pointing out a student's group (e.g. gender, skin shade) in a negative way makes them perform measurably worse. The general term for this is stereotype threat. Creating a bigoted grade standard not only defines bigotry, it creates schools that manufacture evidence for the bigotry. This is an insidious feedback loop. The military-style training of the No Child Left Behind laws is awful, but this Virginia waiver is not an improvement.

Hold up there big thinker! I read where Apple sued Samsung and won, and then Samsung raised prices to Apple. Now you're saying the two aren't necessarily related? That there is more to decision-making than just two actions which media jumped all over? This is not how I prefer my predigested news, but thanks for trying to educate me.

Kia Motors conceded that they overstated the fuel economy on more than 1 million recently sold vehicles, and agreed to compensate owners for the additional fuel costs...

When I make a mistake as an individual, I have to make up the difference, pay fines that are sometimes way more than the difference, get charged higher interest rates for a few years, and watch my credit score plummet. When a business makes a mistake, they pay the difference. Yet another way in which businesses aren't just legal individuals, they're better than real people.

Your comment represents well the very point you are criticizing. Talking about the GOP and Bush and politicizing the report, instead of the report's content, i.e. the wealthy getting increasingly richer off the poor. It's weird how you can't see this.

People gossiping about removal of document instead of contents? Check.

People blaming republicans, conservatives, FOX News, and general unfairness instead of the rich? Check.

Advertising to elect a president and support staff who will lower taxes the most on the richest real-life gamers the world has ever known? Work in progress, though even a Democrat is a success; so check.

People calling and writing their elected representatives? Not enough to overcome the lobbyists, though that shows occasional signs of change.

3) Waste products tend not to be controlled? Are you fucking nuts? The amount of regulation on what to do with the waste water is HUGE (and the assfucks that attempt to dump these fluids are massively fined), not to mention that a good chunk of fracking research goes into figuring out how to best reclaim and reuse of the fluid.

Ummm you do know that corporations compare, among many other items, the costs of these 4 things:

1) The costs of doing a workman-like, regulations-following, job of cleaning up.

2) The costs of cleaning up well enough to avoid prosecution.

3) The fines for not cleaning up. Including lobbying, legal fees, and the odds of being prosecuted for not cleaning up.

4) The costs of letting the local buffer corporation go bankrupt while the public pays for clean up.

Many patents out there are IP theft. They are stealing from public institutions and patenting technology that has been developed in academia.

Not really IP theft because there is no such thing. Ideas are not property. Instead it's a business method based on a lawful falsehood. Let the public pay the costs of developing new ideas, including in universities. A private business then pays for fictional but legal "ownership" of the idea. Then the private business make the profits. In a fair world, the business would give profits back to the public via taxes. In the US part of the world, businesses spend some of the profits on lobbying for reduced taxes.

Microsoft is definitely all-in on this one, if people adopt Windows 8 as a mobile OS, we may very well see Windows taking over the mobile devices market. If it won't, it's only a matter of time until desktop OS's (or at least Windows OS for most desktops) is obsolete, and so will be Microsoft. Only time will tell, but my money is on a colossal failure for Microsoft

This sounds plausible, except Microsoft will not fail so much as change, though perhaps with far less profit. Somewhat like Apple, Windows 8 looks like the largest desktop O/S is moving toward the computer as appliance. This suggests two things:

1) A trend to very slowly reduce the popularity of general purpose computers, shifting people to limited-task devices.
2) Year of the Linux desktop jokes aside, we really could be headed toward Linux/BSD as the main traditional desktop O/S. Not because of advertising or popularity, but because it's the only one.

The money and corporate power will be in the appliances. Independent power will be enhanced by individuals with traditional computers. There is no need for this generation to stock up on motherboards, but long-term thinking makes one wonder if that time will come.